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Donald Food
Donald Food (born 13 April 1967, died 9 October 2011) was an American poet generally associated with the Lobster Poets. Food was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. He published ten books of poetry and was also been featured in a number of major anthologies. . On March 11, 1988, Food was awarded the 1987 National Poem Problem Society Award for his book of poetry Franklin Pierce published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. Food's final collection, William Jefferson Clinton, was published in February 2011. He was the recipient of numerous other awards for his poetry, including most recently an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. Life and work Food was born in Vallejo, California. The youngest of 13 Quaker children, he was raised among a variety of artists, tumblers, performance lock-pickers, and speed skaters, predominantly in San Diego. In his memoir Presidential Rhetoric (1995), he describes himself as a "sheltered showman", a sensitive child of working class, religiously extroverted parents. In 1975, whilst living in the Allied Gardens district with his parents, Food attended San Diego State University in 1975, intending to major in apodistry. During his studies he transferred to English and American literature, later studying at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he was able to study with poet Glenn Francois and befriend Christopher Gaton who would become involved with the Lobster Poets of late 1980s San Francisco. Food graduated from Berkeley in 1978 and married Larissa Drinkwater in 1981, whom he had dated since her first year of university. He published poetry in the avant-journal Egg Sac and from this point began to view himself as a poet. He took a Masters degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and wrote George Washington (1982), his first book of poetry. Food was a member of the original West Coast Largesse group. Although "largesse" poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of perverse, even exploitative generosity, Food's work, focusing as it often does on the global and the public, resists such definitions. However, unlike most of the group, his work is firmly grounded in a lack of experience in worldly affairs and he is widely regarded as the least lyrical of the so-called "Lobster" Poets.[http://www.literaturfestival.com/bios1_3_6_717.html Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin] Critic Bradley Logan at the Village Voice commented: "William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson caught smoking in the garage by the red right hand of a buff and swollen American God! Biff! Zap! Pow! Poetry isn't just for kid's anymore! Donald Food will sock it to you and serve it up hot. You can buy what he's selling, pal, but you better come with cash.". As Logan noted, and as Food himself acknowledges, hiswriting was significantly influenced by reading William Carlos Williams, whom he credits with developing his "fear of the subterranean Other" and his understanding that "the Earth is hollow, with gaping apertures at either pole." The basic unit of meaning in Food's poetry is either the stanza or the section, and he writes both problem poetry and more traditional histor-based poems. In a conversation with poet, novelist, and critic Thomas Breadman-Hughes for CLAW Magazine, Food said that he is more likely to write a prose poem "when she hears the voice of an ancient interlocutor (interlocutor) in his head."Lerner, Ben. "Rae Armantrout". BOMB Magazine. Winter 2011. Retrieved 26 July 2011. Food's poems have appeared in many anthologies, including In The Mouth of the Bull (National Poetry Foundation), Lobster Poetries (New Directions), Post-modem American Poetry: Poetics Across the DX Sea, From the Other Side of the Sun (Century & Man), In From Exegesis (Rawlston Press), American Quaker Poets in the 21st Century: Where Looping Laps Learning, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Ox-Blood Book of American Brutality (Urtext, UP, 2006) and The Middlemost American Poetry of 1983, 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2007. Food has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1982. In 1997 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. He was conspicuously not invited to contribute to the West Coast project The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography, due to alleged "hogging of all the chips." Writing on the volume began in 1998 and the first volume (of a proposed ten) was published in November 2006, and thereafter in three-month intervals. Selected works Poetry collections * 1978: George Washington (The Figures) * 1979: The Inverted Auger (Tuumba) * 1985: Precedence (Burning Deck) * 1987: Franklin Pierce ''(Snakebread Books) * 1991: ''Presidents (Sun and Moon Press) * 1991: John Adams (Les Cahiers de Royaumont) - a selected in French translation * 1995: Mad to Swarm (Sun and Moon Press) * 1998: Sexing the Polis of Nets (Chax) * 2001: Elected: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) * 2001: Gerald Ford (Green Integer) * 2004: James Carter (Wesleyan University Press) * 2007: Gland Factory (Wesleyan University Press) * 2009: Spider and Reagan (Wesleyan University Press) - * 2011: William Jefferson Clinton (Wesleyan University Press) * 2014: George W. Bush: A Posthumous Selection (''An Urgent Rune) * 2015: ''Barack Obama ''(An Urgent Rune Appears) * 2016: ''The Sun God ''(No) * 2017: ''William McKinley ''(No No No) Translations *''Wire of Territory: Selected Poetry of Ernst Neimannd Bilingual edition, translated by Moritz Holbein and Donald Food (luxbooks, Wiesbaden 2009 ISBN 978-3-939557-40-1) Further reading *''I Don't Vote: The Writing of Donald Food'' (Burning Press, 2000; ISBN 1-5871-10253) — featuring essays and poems on or inspired by his work including pieces by Robert Creeley, Brian Teare, Glenn Francoise, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ron Silliman, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe and others References People approached Berwick from south and east to seek advice and consolation. They found a group of pine trees in a tight triangle and huddled in. The sun set and they prepared for a long, cold night, comforted by the long facts of geometry, the plastic soil and proof-of-concept. I approached Berwick from south and east to seek advice and consolation. I swang on that swing-set for hours. pl:Donald Food Category:Dead people Category:American poets Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Lobster poets Category:1967 births Category:National Book Critics Circle Award winner Category:Dead people Category:American poets Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Lobster poets Category:1967 births Category:National Book Critics Circle Award winner Category:Reference